Monday, September 10, 2007

project 365 #251: LAAFF 40 foot bike rider just before the fall

Good weekend for partying - for blogging? Not so much. Sorry, y'all.

Friday night was the weekly girls' get together at Broadways and that was fun. Yes. Leave your car on Lexington Avenue until 3:00 Saturday afternoon fun. Sleep most of Saturday fun. You know. I did make it over to yet another discount grocery store - the Sav Mor on Patton Avenue, which my friend C had told me was actually the Ingles discount store. I would like at this point to point out that six months ago, there were at least three and often five people living in my house, along with two dogs, and I used to go to two grocery stores - Ingles and Earth Fare. Now, there are two people and two dogs living in my house and I'm going to three grocery stores, all of which fall under the category my friend N calls "Used Food Stores" and my weekly grocery bill is almost a third higher than it was then. This is just not right. I'm not even going to Earth Fare but maybe once a month at this point and then it's only for Emergen-C, Greek yogurt, pink lady apples and good bread, none of which are obtainable at the other stores.

Anyway, I came home from the grueling shopping experience with a pathetic yet expensive array of groceries and made dinner and watched Pan's Labyrinth. It was not at all what I expected. Whoa. Dark. Sad. Dark and sad, in fact. But kind of weirdly beautiful, for all that. It's always a little disconcerting when you turn on a movie expecting a fantasy, get away, total escapist thing and get instead, well, a bleak Spanish war movie.

I also read Elizabeth Hand's new book, Generation Loss, which I highly recommend right along with all her other books because she is a fucking genius. Yes. She's a genius and also, she has shot right up to the top of my Famous People I Would Genuinely Like to Go Out Drinking With. One caveat: if alcohol & drug abuse bother you, you won't like this book. But then if that's the case, honey, why would you be reading my blog? Hee. Actually, I'm kind of surprised I liked it so much. Usually I have a hard time with protagonists I don't like, who I find pretty much utterly unsympathetic, and I really didn't like the heroine of this novel, but the book drew me in nevertheless. Also, bonus, there's a lot of terrific information about contemporary photography.

Ah. And then Sunday was LAAFF, the Lexington Avenue Art & Fun Festival, or the Lex Ave Freak Fest as we like to call it. The big event was the 40 foot bike ride, which alas, did not quite happen. I mean it happened but very briefly because he fell over, which was terrifying even though we all knew that he was attached to a crane. Apparently, he had fallen off his 12 foot bike (one of the things I love about Asheville is that there is a guy who rides around downtown on a 12 foot high bike and we all see him often) on a warmup ride a few minutes before and messed UP his knee. We missed this part being as we were up on the Broadways roof deck drinking a quiet beer in the shade. So he gamely went on to climb the scaffolding and ride the 40 foot bike but I think his injuries from the 12 foot fall were worse than he thought and anyway, he keeled over quite quickly. 40 feet, by the way, is very tall. I mean it is huge. I mean it is bigger than every building on Lexington Avenue and it was scary as all get out. But then someone released a whole bunch of superballs into the wild and the party recommenced and all was okay.

It was hot as hell at LAAFF but fun and full of photo opps. After that we went on over to my friend J's new house for the end of his housewarming and it is a supercool and adorable new house and I am jealous. He has cool paint karma, does J - everywhere he moves is already painted in all these wacky luscious shades.

So that was my weekend. Also, I cleaned my house with bleach spray - fuck the hippie cleaners, man, they do not work - and it looks awesome and I got horrific cramps, which has not been so awesome but is, after all, the way that the gods in their kindness make sure that women are really incredibly happy to see the end of their menstrual cycles when it finally comes. Because you need 5 - 10 years of ever increasingly awful periods to prepare you for menopause. Grrrrrrr.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey, great slideshow of LAAFF. I was going to go, got as far as Saluda and realized I'd left my wallet at home, so I bagged. But your photos make me feel like I was there. Especially like the Hank Williams framed in PBR logos and the art cars.

Edgy Mama said...

Regarding peri-menopause, I've almost mentioned this before, but....well, there's a huge caveat.

I was having the same horrendous symptoms about a year ago, where half the month I was bleeding and the other half I was PMSing. It SUCKED!

My mid-wife decided that my quality of life was being adversely affected, and, in order to keep me somewhat sane, put me on ultra-low dose birth control pills. Since then I've had NO period. None. No bleeding. No PMS. I would give my puppy away before I'd give up my pills. Okay, maybe the fat cat instead. I'm an addict. LOVE THEM!

But, the caveat. You know what's coming. They won't prescribe them to smokers. Not that you have to admit to it.